Adjustment Period
by SomniumofLight
Summary: How does one adjust to a new life as a supernatural entity? The Ten manage, somehow. (Sequel to "Things Change.")
1. Dipper

Being a tree sucked.

Well, okay, being a tree wasn't the worst thing that could've happened to him, considering what had happened to Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan – at least he could still talk to the others whenever they dropped by – but still. Him, a tree. It sucked.

He couldn't move (save for those creepy hand-branch things sprouting for his body, which moved like ordinary arms and hands, sometimes on their own.) He was rooted to the ground, without legs to carry him indoors when chilly nightfall came, and he felt so, so sluggish then, too, and on days when the sun was hidden behind clouds or when Wendy came to visit. He could only imagine how bad this would get during the winter.

And one guy with an axe would be all it took to kill him. After all he'd gone through, after shape-shifters and infinity dice and Multi-Bear and _Weirdmageddon_ , it could be a sharp piece of metal on a stick that killed him.

If Bill could still see him from wherever he'd ended up, he was probably laughing his triangular butt off.

So, here he was. A tree. A really creepy tree, covered in faces and glowing lichen, that could make other trees grow.

Mabel could fly, McGucket could teleport, Gideon could see into the future, Wendy could create mini-snowstorms, Soos could shape-shift – heck, even Robbie had some useful power, even if he couldn't really control it! And here he was, staring at a tree off to one side of the clearing he stood in, and concentrating on growing moss.

He felt so useless.

Dipper glared at the tree with his new hollow sockets, then sighed, and turned his gaze skyward. It was almost nighttime again – a couple dozen nights out here in the wilderness, unable to go anywhere. Mabel would be coming by again – she always came to visit him after her now-daily flight around the town – and would try to cheer him up again.

And again, it probably wouldn't help. It would just make him feel more useless.

Reacting to his frustration, a small sapling burst from the ground with a _pfft_ of displaced dirt. There was already a small scattering of them all over the clearing, tiny and disturbing.

"Stop it already!" he yelled at it hoarsely.

It didn't answer. Of course it didn't.

* * *

"Wow, you look really frustrated today."

Dipper turned his gaze away from the darkening forest floor – where several new saplings had sprouted in the last hour – and up to the tiny glowing figure that was his sister, hovering just above him.

"Hey Mabel."

"Come on, bro-bro, cheer up a little!" She reached out with the ribbons growing from her head, moving them as if to pinch his wooden cheeks. "It's not so bad!"

"Not so bad? Mabel, I'm a _tree!"_

"A tree that can grow other trees!"

"And that's _all I can do!_ I can't make trees move, or talk to animals, or –"

She patted his cheeks again. "Shhh. It's fine! And you might be able to talk to trees! Have you tried that?"

Dipper stared at his little sister. Then he stared at the trees. Then at Mabel again.

"Mabel, trees can't talk."

She pointed at the largest of the saplings growing from the ground, which was already almost half Dipper's height after a brief few weeks.

"Try it!" She ordered, pink glowing eyes scrunched up in her new equivalent of an impish grin. "Be the Lorax, Dipper!"

"Are you ever going to let that go?"

"Nope!"

With a huff – and a stifled grin, because there was no way he was going to let Mabel see him smile at a joke like that – he stared at the sapling.

"Uh, hi?" he said.

The tree didn't answer.

"See? It doesn't work."

"Try harder!" she insisted.

Dipper sighed, and tried again. "Hello, uh, little tree? I'm Dipper. Who're you?"

No answer.

 _Man_ he felt dumb.

"Again!"

"Mabel, it's not gonna –"

"Try again!" she insisted.

"Mabel, trees can't talk!"

" _You_ can!"

"I'm not a real tree, though!"

She deflated for a moment, then perked up again. "Well, maybe they can't talk, but maybe they can think! Try thinking it at them!"

Dipper sighed again. No use in arguing with Mabel when she was in one of these moods. Feeling dumber and dumber by the second, he thought as hard as he could at the sapling: _Hello?_

There wasn't a reply in words.

But there _was_ a weird feeling. He couldn't quite place what it was, but there was _something._

 _Hello?_

The feeling intensified. Frowning, Dipper concentrated as hard as he could at the sapling -

And his senses fractured. His sense of touch was impossibly _intense!_ He could feel vibrations in the ground – something that felt almost like footsteps, coming from an animal trail he remembered being nearby, an unidentifiable sensation that had a scraping feel to it. And sounds sounded louder, and echoed, like he was hearing two at once. And his vision! He was seeing in two directions at once! One from his normal point of view, where he could see Mabel's slightly worried face -

And one from below, looking _up at himself_ and his pained expression from about the same height as his "waist."

With a yelp, Dipper forced his focus back on an intensely watching Mabel, and the sensations were gone. The little sapling's trunk twitched, then went still again.

One of the faces in it's bark looked an awful lot like his, now. It hadn't been like that before.

How had that happened? _What_ had happened?

"Dipper?"

Hesitantly, he _focused_ on the tiny tree, on that weird feeling, and again, his senses split, but this time he was a little more ready for it. His original eyes stayed open, and it was like he was seeing a different scene in each eye, one eye looking down at the sapling, with it's little dark eyes that'd opened in one of the faces, and one eye looking _up_ at himself, staring _down_ at himself with a considerably more human face.

And also at Mabel, who was waving a little nubby limb in front of his face in frustration, and shouting.

"Hey, Dipdop! Hey! You okay?"

"Y-yeah." he managed, and watched _both_ of his mouths – one his, one a mouthlike depression beneath the new eyes on the sapling – move with the words, making it come out as an echo of sorts. Mabel jumped, and turned to stare at the little sapling.

With an exhausting burst of concentration, Dipper slowly raised one of the sapling's hand-like branches, and waved it at her.

For a moment, she only stared. Then her little pink eyes scrunched up into a huge grin again.

"That's so COOL!" she screeched.

And even though his head felt like it was splitting in two at being _literally in two places at once_ , Dipper couldn't help but feel a little better about himself.

He was still a tree, but maybe, just _maybe_ , he wasn't as useless as he thought.


	2. Mabel

Flying was Awesome.

Of course, there were a lot of _awesome_ things, but flying? _Awesome,_ with a capital "A." It was like having your own personal roller coaster, where you could go as high as you wanted and do as many loop-de-loops as you wanted, without tracks or cars or seat belts or cotton candy to throw up –

Okay, that last bit kinda took the magic out of it, but still, it was Awesome!

With a whoop, Mabel flipped in midair and dived straight down. Wind whistled, clouds went _poof_ behind her as she shot through them, the ground came rushing up, woods, dusted in trees and rocks and a cave entrance in the distance and a little pond right below her, and she landed in the water with a huge _SPLASH_ and a burst of hissing steam.

She surfaced after a moment, and pumped her tiny not-fists in the air, ribbons glowing brighter with cheer.

"WHOOT! That was AWESOME!"

She giggled for a moment, then rose up into the air –

Tried to rise up into the air. She frowned – well, her eyes furrowed the same way they would if she still had a mouth to frown – and looked down. She could barely see her tiny not-feet in the water below her, paddling and keeping her on the surface.

Hadn't they been a lot brighter before? And yellow, not a dull orange-red?

She tried to rise again. Nothing.

And her legs were numb. And her arms too, where they'd been in the water.

Well, that was a bummer. Why couldn't she fly?

She looked around. There was a low-hanging branch nearby, almost right on the surface of the water, and with a thought and a little _hup_ , she sent her hair-ribbons flying out and grabbing ahold of the branch, and reeled herself in.

The instant she scrambled up out of the water, the numbness became a wintery chill, and she realized that she'd been shivering and that she still was.

"W-wow t-th-that's cold." she stuttered out loud. "W-why is i-it so c-cold-d?"

It was still warm out, after all – summer had only been a couple months ago. Why was the water so cold when it was still warm out?

"I'll ask D-Dipper," she decided out loud. After she'd warmed up.

* * *

"It was cold?"

"Reeeaaally cold!" Mabel nodded furiously, still rubbing her tiny nub-hands together. She'd wrapped her ribbons around herself, too, and it had helped, but she still felt chilly. She was still shivering, too, and even her ribbons were shivering, which would've been funny if it was somebody else and not her.

Her bro-bro frowned, his face making a loud creaking noise as it moved. "Was there anything in the water?"

"Nope, j-just water! I could even s-see the bottom!"

"Any plants?"

What did plants have to do with anything? Well, Dipper was smarter than her, so maybe it would make sense to him to ask about plants…

"Yep, some s-short grass on the bottom! I didn't know g-grass-s can grow underwater!"

"And it wasn't brown or anything?"

"Nope!"

The frown grew bigger, and one of Dipper's cool arm-branch-hand things reached down so he could chew on it like he did his pens. Man, even Dipper didn't know? He was thinking so hard, too.

"Did anything else happen?"

"Hmmm..." Suddenly she remembered the dull orange her legs had turned. "Oh! My legs changed color in the water, they t-turned orange!"

He blinked. "Orange?"

"Yep! And w-when I was out of the water, t-they started turning yellow again."

Dipdop kept thinking for a few moments. Then he reached out with a branch-hand and poked her.

"H-hey!" she giggled, then yelped as the poke registered as _pain_ , like she'd just touched a hot stove. "Ow!"

The blank sockets – which were both creepy _and_ cool – blinked, and he looked alarmed.

"S-sorry!" he yelped. "Um, that really hurt?"

She nodded.

He started chewing on one hand again. Several saplings burst out of the ground with showers of dirt as he thought.

"You're colder than before. I don't mean _you_ feeling cold, I mean you feel colder to me, you're body heat's gone down…"

He looked worried. Was being colder a bad thing?

"And if you turned from yellow to orange, that's like hot metal or fire cooling down, too. And if that cools down too much..."

Oh. That explained why he was so worried. If fire cooled down too much, _it went out_.

"So w-water makes me go out? I'm l-like f-fire?"

"I mean, I think so?"

Well, that sucked. She could never go swimming again – and Mermando! She couldn't ever visit him!

Well, not that she could ever visit him anyway, since she was stuck here in Gravity Falls, but still!

"I'm fine, bro-bro," she insisted, seeing his expression. "I just have to stay out of the water, right?"

"Yeah, but –"

"And if I'm fire, then I can throw fireballs and stuff!"

There was a wooden _thunk_ as Dipper slapped a hand to his forehead. "Mabel, I don't think you can shoot fireballs..."

"Sure I can!" She lifted one nub and grinned at it, willing a fireball to burst into life.

Nothing happened.

"Um, let me try again..."

"Mabel –"

"No no, I can totally do this, Dip!"

"Mabel!"

* * *

Two weeks later, she determined that she could, in fact, do one better than fireballs, and create firework-like light shows and laser beams instead.

Which was pretty Awesome.


	3. Wendy

Wendy had never been a big fan of the cold.

Now, that didn't mean she _disliked_ the cold – cold meant snow, snow meant epic Corduroy snowball fights and _could_ mean snow days, and snow days were an excuse to slack off that wouldn't get her yelled at by her boss. (Not that he ever yelled at her after the first few times – she'd gotten _way_ too good at sneaking in her breaks.)

Of course, snow days also meant a high likelihood of needing to shovel snow and chip ice off driveways and cars, so she didn't exactly _like_ it either.

So she wasn't quite sure what to think about turning into a giant bipedal fox made of ice. On one hand, if it hadn't happened to her, she might've thought it was cool. Making snowstorms and leaving behind ice footprints? It was something right out of those nerdy fantasy TV shows her oldest brother secretly liked.

On the other hand, it'd happened to _her_ , and she'd been turned into a giant fox.

So, much like normal winter things, it kinda evened itself out.

Wendy tapped her new ice claws – another thing she was conflicted about, because those things were seriously useful, even if they were made of ice and left frost behind on anything they touched – against a tree trunk, watching icy ferns grow up and into the crevices of the bark.

Her family had taken the transformation surprisingly well. Well, maybe not _too_ surprisingly, considering who her dad was – she'd helped save the entire town, after all, and as far as Manly Dan was concerned, it was the most manly thing any of his family had ever done. He'd more or less screamed his pride for her actions loud enough for the entire town to hear. But still, all things considered, the worst reaction her turning-into-an-ice-fox thing had gotten was worry and the occasional yelp when her cold snaps took someone by surprise.

And yelling at her to get out of the house because it was too cold.

That was one thing about this that _definitely_ sucked, right there. She just didn't _fit_ in the house anymore. Well, she could crouch going through the door, and go onto all fours to keep her head from knocking into the ceiling, but it wasn't the same, and her tails couldn't fit into the house. They were too wide and spiky, and though they looked "ridiculously awesome," according to Mabel, it was impossible to get them through the front door without breaking the frame.

It made her feel so _alien_ , like she didn't belong there.

So she'd started hanging out in the woods instead. There, her snowstorms couldn't inconvenience anybody except the animals and maybe Dipper, who she visited every now and then. (Little guy had it worse than her, that was for sure. She couldn't even _imagine_ being stuck in one place like that.)

A rustling caught her attention, and the by-now familiar _pfft_ of a sapling bursting from the ground.

"Hey Wendy!"

She blinked her three blue eyes (three eyes was yet another thing she was unsure of – on the one hand, it made her vision that much sharper, but on the other, it just made her even more alien than before) at the little tree, which looked less like the normal saplings and more like a mini-version of Dipper. It even had his face in the trunk, with dark sockets, a little nose, and a mouth. No birthmark, though.

"Hey Dip," she said. "That's a new trick."

"Huh? Oh, yeah, the uh, sapling. Figured out how to do it last week!" The little tree held out it's spindly branch-limbs, as if going _tah-dah_. "So, uh, what'ya think?"

Wendy gave the little tree a cursory once-over, and a sniff (her sense of smell had gotten a lot better when the icy snout had grown out of her nose, though it probably wasn't as good as Soos's.) The weird, earthy, not-quite-a-tree scent that Dipper had had since _his_ change was rather faint, with a new scent, something newer, added to the mix.

"Are you, like, in two places at once?"

"Yep!" The sapling leaned a little away from her nose – right, she must've looked huge to him like this – and grinned almost bashfully. "It gives me a headache when I do it, but I'm doing better at it than when I first found out about it! I can be four trees at once now!"

He looked so freaking proud of himself, the little goober. She couldn't blame him – it sounded _hard_ , having one mind in more than one body. She couldn't even _imagine_ it.

"Well, good on you, dude. Glad to see you're not moping anymore!"

He pouted. "I wasn't moping."

"You were."

"Wasn't!"

Wendy cracked a grin at his stubbornness – this was the Dipper she knew, alright. It was good to see him back to his old self.

Well, kind of his old self. The whole being-a-tree-thing threw that through a loop.

And if Dipper, one of the most self-conscious guys on the planet, could feel better about this whole situation, then so could she.


	4. Soos

He'd thought that after the Apocalypse, anything else would seem tame. And he'd been right, for a little while at least, up until the point that one of his little buddies started floating and Mr. Pines had turned into a statue. After that, everything had just gotten weird again.

Not that he was going to complain! A good handyman never complained if he could help it. And since he could be extra-handy now, what with the extra hands he got sometimes, he had even less of an excuse to complain.

Soos wouldn't deny that was getting a little _too_ weird for him, though, the whole growing-new-parts thing he could do. The tentacle-arm thing had been cool, as well as the back scratcher, the dog nose, and everything else up to the point he suddenly couldn't change back. It was still useful to a handyman, of course, but the fact that people got nervous around him was a little awful.

Heck, even Melody got a little nervous sometimes!

As soon as she'd heard what'd happened, she'd come rushing back to Gravity Falls to make sure _he_ was okay! He'd never met a girl who would do that before, and it was great, but by the time she'd gotten there, he'd already lost the ability to change back.

She was awesome enough to try not to look too scared of him, like some people did, but sometimes whenever he did something weird, like grow a fork out of one of his fingers or another mouth to eat with since his other one was kinda buried under a bunch of squiggly whisker things, she'd look a little nervous. She'd hide it, and assure him that it was okay and that she knew he wasn't nearly as scary as he looked, but she was still nervous around him.

It hurt. It hurt a lot.

But at least his buds were around, and they didn't seem so scared of him, and that made things a little easier. Mabel would throw those fireworks she'd discovered she could make into the air at night over the Shack, trying to cheer him up with lots of fun colors, and whenever he went to go see Dipper in the woods, the little dude tried his best to cheer him up with a smile and tell him about the newest trick he'd learned, or how one of his saplings had been dug up by the gnomes and re-planted in their little hollow deeper in the woods, or how he'd accidentally freaked out a unicorn the other day by growing a sapling right in front of her hooves, or how the fairies had decided to decorate every tree of his they could find with flower chains and sparkles, including Dipper himself.

It helped, knowing that everybody else was still there, and going through the same sort of thing he was, and above all, _not scared of him._

But whenever Melody looked away from his newest appendage, or whenever a passerby in town flinched when he offered a friendly fist-bump, it _hurt_.

Soos knew it would only make it worse, but he couldn't help but wish that the change had never happened.

* * *

"Hey, Soos!"

Soos blinked, looking around. The world around him was black and white – like that one time he'd been in Mr. Pines' head, trying to chase out Bill.

"Hey! Soos, I'm talking to you!"

The man spun around, trying to see where the voice was coming from. He was in his Abuela's old house, in the hallway outside his bedroom, but instead of there being doorways into the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the living room, the doorways seemed to open up into big hallways that stretched on forever and ever, filled with doors and flashing lights.

"Soos, don't make me find some way of taking back the Shack!"

And that was when he finally noticed the faint figure standing in front of him, ghostlike and very hard to see.

The world around him went from dark and gloomy to bright as soon as he recognized the man.

"Mr. Pines!"

"Oof!"

Mr. Pines stumbled back a few paces as Soos tackled him in a bear hug. He looked not-at-all like stone, his old regular suit-wearing cane-toting self. Actually, he looked _better_ here! Less tired, more upright, at least before the hug.

Soos had never been so glad to see someone in his life, even if he was clearly dreaming.

"Mr. Pines, how have you been?! I haven't seen you since – well, uh, since you became a statue. Wow, this is a little awkward."

The old man squirmed a little until Soos let go, then cleared his throat, adjusting his tie and adverting his gaze a little.

"Fine, Soos, fine. But _you've_ been getting really mopey – it's a real downer. So, what's been up?"

The good feeling vanished, and Soos sagged, looking down at his _normal human hands_. He didn't have the mass of limbs and tools growing out of his body here.

If only he could look like that in real life.

"Is that it?"

Soos looked up at Mr. Pines in surprise. He hadn't said anything!

"Look, Soos, you're a good guy. Stupidly naive and kinda gopher-ish, and you smell kinda weird, but a good guy. People'll get used to you soon, and when they do, they'll be groveling at your feet for an apology!" Mr. Pines rolled his eyes. "Besides, you're Mr. Mystery now! You've gotta be the freakiest thing in the Shack now, use that! You can get a lot of customers that way, they'll come flocking, with all their wallets! So stop impersonating that emo friend of Wendy's and get your ass back in gear!"

He wasn't crying in front of Mr. Pines, he wasn't!

"T-thank you, Mr. Pines! I-I'll try!"

The man grunted, and then suddenly Soos was waking up, with sunshine shining into his various eyes.

He hadn't had a dream that good in ages.

Then he looked down at one of his more human hands, and blinked.

There on his hands was written, in Mr. Pines' handwriting, _Get your ass into gear, Soos!_

He may not have looked too human anymore, but the expression on his face couldn't be mistaken for anything other than a smile.


	5. Stan

Stan Pines had never cursed someone's existence as much as he had Cipher's, and never so colorfully.

Well, apart from those gangsters in Chicago, and the gamblers in New York, and those layabouts who'd stolen his old truck -

Okay, he'd cursed the existence a lot of people, but _still_ , the isosceles jackass took the cake, and he didn't like his stuff being taken!

Grumbling to himself and occasionally spitting a foul word into the black-and-white world he now lived in, the former Mr. Mystery glared out at the world.

Being invisible sucked. He'd thought he'd gotten the basic gist of it before, when his dad paid all his attention to Ford and his genius inventions and good grades instead of his little screw-up, but somehow this was even worse. At least _then_ people could actually see him, and just _chose_ to ignore him. Now he was literally a $  &* ghost, drifting in and out of buildings and right through people, because to them, he simply _didn't exist._

Oh, _sure_ , they all knew about him, Stan Pines, town hero, but they sure as hell didn't know he was there, and it _sucked!_

So yeah. Here he was, cursing at Bill's very existence with every swear word he knew and some that he just made up on the spot, floating in the middle of the god-damn Mindscape.

What made it any worse, though, was that even his family couldn't tell he was there. Not his niblings, not his brother who he'd _just barely made up with dammit_ , not even Corduroy and Soos! He was just floating there over them, and nobody could tell he was there, and it _hurt_ to see _his family_ hurting like this, and to know he couldn't _be there_ for them, because he was stuck here, and turned to stone in the town square.

$&* # you, Bill.

* * *

The whole sneaking-into-dreams thing happened on accident. He'd known, obviously, that his dreams could influence other suckers', I mean, _peoples'_ dreams, but it'd slipped his mind after that last glimpse of the world in color, before everything had gone monochrome. Because he wasn't _asleep_ this time, dammit.

But then he'd seen a burst of color while floating above the town in a literal thundercloud of emotion (oh, yeah, _that_. Another reason he hated this place, he couldn't scam people if they could literally _see_ his emotions!) and, with nothing better to do, he'd gone to snoop.

And found himself in someone's Mindscape, and hearing their thoughts.

He didn't know the sod, but if he were to hazard a guess, it might've been one of Corduroy's little brothers, considering that, when he walked through a door labeled _"Memories"_ in the side of a massive log cabin, he caught a glimpse of a very familiar red-haired man wrestling with a fish almost as big as he was, in a boat, with several boys cheering him on.

It couldn't have been Manly Dan himself, though, considering that he was fairly sure the guy wasn't the sort to watch geeky fantasy shows.

It would take him several more trips in and out of people's personal Mindscapes before he got the hang of it. It would be even longer before he figured out he could _influence_ their dreams on an even more conscious level than before.

And it would be even longer than that before he realized that there were _holes_ everywhere in the Mindscape, camouflaged and difficult to see, but _there_ , reaching into the beyond.

He poked at the border of the hole. He'd managed to pull aside whatever was hiding it, and now the gut-wrenching colors and weird drippy edges, with black blobs disappearing sideways into the gap, were exposed and looking very much like someone had torn open a hole in the world.

Torn open a rift. Oh hell no.

Was this another one of those interdimensional portal things, like the one that # $* had come through?!

Stan stepped back, glaring at the thing as it pulsed sinisterly in front of him. It _looked_ like the portal, and it'd been hidden well enough that he doubted it was there by accident. Ford's journal had theorized that Bill came from someplace called the Nightmare Realm, right? Was this how he'd gotten into the Mindscape?

With a snarl, Stan grabbed the weird warpage on each side of the opening, and smashed it shut.

There was a shockwave. Not a tiny little _oh, look, a ripple_ kind of shockwave, but a massive, tree-destroying, earth-smashing _shockwave_ , like a bomb had been dropped.

When the gray dust had cleared, the opening was gone, and the rippling space that had given it away was smooth and flawless. When he aimed a shove at the spot, just to make sure, his hands passed right through the spot. There was none of the weird tingling sensation that had given it away, just thin air.

Good. One less problem to deal with.

Later, as he found other holes and closed them, it would dawn on him that for all he knew, these holes could bring Cipher back from wherever he'd been banished to, and he'd begin hunting these openings in earnest, because even if he couldn't be there for his family except as a statue or someone to talk to in dreams, the least he could do was make sure that the scourge of so many townsfolk's nightmares (and his family's, too) never came back to haunt them.

 _Let's just see you try to come back, demon. I_ dare _you._


	6. Gideon

It was nice to have the town's respect back, but it was one thing to be respected, and another to be _trusted_.

Honestly, he didn't blame them one bit. After all, he'd done some truly awful things – he'd been a fraud, a deceiver, and had done everything from summon a demon to possess his own father! He wanted to redeem himself, he did! But it was kinda hard to, when one had no arms or legs. How was he supposed to make it up to the town when he couldn't _do_ anything? How was he supposed to make it up to _Mabel?_

Gideon let out a little discouraged huff, his eye flaring green-blue at the sound. If anybody else had been there with him, in his ol' Tent of Telepathy, that would've been all they could see – a glowing eyeball, reflecting light off crystalline arcs around it.

The prophetic powers had been an unforeseen little gift. He'd just woken up one day, and _known_ , somehow, how the last three hours of the day would play out – everything from a Manotaur's accident with an axe to what the Dinner Special would be at Greasy's. And that had been hella nice, while it lasted. Finally, he was a real psychic! No amulets or deception necessary.

Then the transformation had begun, and everything had spiraled downhill. And here he was, a living crystal ball floatin' in the dark.

The townsfolk had stopped coming for their genuine fortunes once the transformation had begun, only Ghost-Eyes and his other henchmen coming to visit regularly. They were perfectly willing to ignore his new appearance in favor of speaking to their boss – especially Ghost-Eyes, who had never seen his little boss's face anyway. And it was a nice sentiment – they were loyal folks, who'd stuck with him even when he'd broken free of prison to help herald an Apocalypse, or when he'd led them against an all-powerful space demon. But they were just a small lil' group, and his somewhat horrific appearance (though not nearly so much so as that naive handyman's or Dipper's) tended to scare other folks off – even his own father couldn't quite look him in the eye!

It was discouraging, to say the very least. Oh, if only he'd never made those deals with Bill! Then, perhaps, none of this would've happened!

But there was nothin' to be done about it now. The past was past. All he could do was struggle to find some way to repay the town for his transgressions, and it was slow going.

* * *

"Gangway!"

With a screeching of sirens, Gravity Falls' single firetruck went rushing past, followed quickly by a beat-up, stuttery cop car.

Which promptly broke down outside the tent.

"Well, dangnabbit!"

Gideon peeked around the tent flap as the officers struggled to kick the car back into gear – literally, in Officer Blub's case. They seemed mighty desperate to get moving.

"What's goin' on, officers?"

The men jumped and looked at him with wide-eyed expressions for a moment, before visibly relaxing.

"Oh, 'ello there 'lil Gideon!" Deputy Durland greeted him cheerfully. "Gosh, haven't seen you since the whole Weirdmageddon thing!"

"Yes, yes, I know that. What's goin' on?"

"Big 'ole fire in the town square." Blubs said. "Sorry, can't stay, we gotta make sure the firetruck gets there!"

With some more spluttering engine noises and a push from behind (Gideon helped with that as best he could) the car was soon running, and it was just as it was starting to pull away that another vision hit him like a loaded semi-truck.

 _Fire, crackling, a creaking of burning beams, yelling, a pudgy officer with dark skin holding out his arms to catch a victim jumping down from above to escape the flames, a beam falling right onto him as he caught the little girl, wood and fire colliding with delicate human tissue –_

Gideon yanked back into awareness with a gasp.

"Officer Blubs!" he called after the car. "When the 'lil girl jumps out a shop window, there's a beam that'll fall on 'ya!"

That was all he could get out before the car was out of view, and he could only hope the officer heard him.

* * *

That night, Deputy Durland would come to the Tent in a cop car even more beat up than it had been that mornin', and thank Gideon profusely for the vision that had saved his partner. And before he left, he gave Gideon a little walkie-talkie, connected to an enormous remote with a great big red button, and told him that Blubs wanted to know whenever something else was going to happen as soon as he saw it.

And Gideon felt just a little bit better about himself. Just a bit.


	7. Pacifica

The Northwest – ugh, _McGucket –_ Estate was just as big as she remembered – and, somehow, despite the large number of items that had disappeared or been sold, more homely than it had ever been before.

That being homely in the sense of _friendly_ , not in the same sense as the tiny atrocity of a Mystery Shack.

Pacifica shifted uncomfortably, feeling unseen eyes on her. Probably the old hobo again – she remembered having talked to him before, briefly, when she'd first been taken in, after her truly _horrible_ parents had tried to _sell_ her. She couldn't actually remember the conversation now, but that was the only actual conversation they'd had, which had somehow ended up with her being allowed to stay here.

She knew she'd seen the old man after that, several times, but she couldn't remember exactly what he'd looked like. It made her uneasy. The fact that the hobo could teleport made her uneasy too, he could appear literally _anywhere_.

So she'd squirreled herself away in her old quarters in the hopes the old man would leave her in peace, and so far, apart from dropping in to make sure she was _feeling okay_ (how was she supposed to feel okay in this situation?) he'd done so.

His son was a little more tolerable, if a bit dull.

Honestly, what kind of crazy family had they born into, to have such a huge range of _personalities?_ She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

The feeling of unseen eyes vanished, and Pacifica sighed with relief, before focusing her attention back on her glittering hands and the various old jeweled artifacts and gold coins she'd managed to find in corners of the manor.

 _How can Mabel make her powers look so easy?_

Oh, she'd _used_ her powers before – that one time during her parent's _fundraiser_ (or, in other words, their attempts to re-line their pockets) had even been kinda funny, even if she'd gotten a scolding and _the bell_ for it. But now that she actually _wanted_ her powers to work, they _wouldn't_.

 _Unacceptable._ She was a Northwest – she should've been able to _get it_ by now, but she couldn't, and _Mabel_ was flying around out there like there was no tomorrow, throwing up sparkles or something like that, and oh-so happy-go-lucky and carefree. How come _she_ had it easy all of a sudden?!

With a growl of frustration, Pacifica waved her hand at the collection of gems and metals, and in her fury the metals _melted_ , seeping into the carpet, before vaporizing into gleaming dust and leaving the gems behind.

 _Well, there goes some more of the family fortune._

"You doing okay there, miss?"

She yelped and spun around, and the gems went flying through the air, landing on either side of the man's head and sticking into the door and walls. To his credit, McGucket's son barely even flinched, just took off his hat, looked carefully at it for marks, then put it back on and letting it slump over his eyes again.

"You okay?" he repeated, looking pointedly at the metal dust and the molten gold that was already cooling on the floorboards. "Need any help?"

Pacifica scoffed. "Like you'd be able to _help_ me with any of this!"

"That wasn't a no."

Damn this commoner! Commoners weren't supposed to be so _perceptive!_

"It's fine!"

"Don't look too fine, miss."

 _Urgh,_ and the _informalities._ She could tolerate that from Dipper or Mabel, they were her own age, after all, but from this coot?

The man gave the metal and gems another cursory glance, before informing her bluntly, "It might be easier if you start with a smaller load first, Miss Northwest," and turning on his heels and leaving.

Oh, _sure_. Just _practice_ with a smaller load first. She was supposed to get it _right_ the first time!

With another angry huff, she reached down with one hand (being made out of mobile pieces of gold and jewelry was pretty handy if you didn't want to bend over) and began cleaning the dust off the floor.

"Pacifica!"

"Pacifica, darling, please come out! Your father and I want to speak to you!"

If she'd had any blood left to go cold, it would've done so the _moment_ she heard those all-too-familiar voices outside the door.

Her _parents._ How had they gotten onto the grounds? Hadn't the McGuckets hired _guards?_

"Pacifica, get down here right this moment!"

She could ignore them – she'd done it in the past, at that disastrous party. She could do it again.

A familiar _ringing_ made her freeze. _Of course_ they'd brought the bell. They brought it with them _everywhere_ , just in case their darling little daughter _misbehaved._

"Pacifica, get down here!"

She couldn't get punished for the bell anymore, she told herself. They tried to _sell_ her. They didn't want her anymore, she could stay and nothing would happen.

 _Ring ring._

The bell rang a few more times until there was finally the sound of a door opening on the floor below, and the sound of McGucket's voice, telling them to leave.

"We will _not!_ " Her father proclaimed. "We will _not_ leave until _our daughter_ comes out to meet us."

Oh, so she was _their daughter_ now? Temper boiling, she marched to the window and threw it open, letting blinding sun pour in and setting her whole body ablaze with reflected light.

"I stopped being your daughter the moment you tried to _sell_ me!" she cried.

Her father raised the bell, frowning, but before he could ring it again, she reached out, and, with a quick swipe of her hand, sent the little instrument flying away.

It disappeared over the garden walls, tinkling merrily as it went, and disappearing into the woods below.

"I'm not coming with you!" she snapped to their stunned faces. "Find some other way to line your pockets with gold! _You're not using me again!"_

Several minutes later, when the McGuckets came looking for her, they found her holding out trembling, jangling hands, taking in deep calming breaths and watching a tiny system of gems and coins orbit around each other in thin air above her palms.


	8. Robbie

Right after being turned back from a stone statue, he'd said something about being "dark and tortured for _realz_ now."

What had he been _thinking?_

Robbie knew he'd never exactly been what some people called _cheerful_. Heck, how was he supposed to be _happy_ in a god-damn funeral home, where the rooms regularly smelled like corpses and a graveyard was his front lawn? But this was _beyond_ his usual absence of cheer. At least then he could still _be_ happy sometimes, instead of being a swirling mass of macabre, Lovecraftian despair.

He couldn't smile anymore, or laugh. Every time he tried, any time any of his weird rotting mouths so much as _twitched_ in a sign of joviality, it was accompanied by a sharp bolt of pain, easily ten times as unpleasant as when he'd been turned into a statue. He couldn't offer comfort, either – when his parents, his bright and disgustingly cheerful parents, broke down crying because _as much as we love our job, you just weren't ready to become a zombie yet,_ he tried to reach out, to say something nonchalant and self-suffering, just like before, only for the rotting limb he reached out with to sizzle and crackle, and he would suddenly find himself retreating into a corner, hissing with too many mouths at the agony crackling through him.

So yeah. _Dark and tortured, for realz?_

Just the thought made him want to go back in time and _laugh_ at his younger self. Or flip himself the bird, assuming that he could with these weird tentacle arms.

It only got worse from there.

Days passed, and soon not only was he flinching in pain at every smile, every giggle, every symptom of exuberance on the streets, but some part of him wanted to go so far as to _squash it like a bug._

He only noticed it when Tambry came to visit him – oh, he hadn't realized how much he missed her, being the weird thing he was now, until he saw her at the door – and upon seeing her smile, had this disturbing little thought.

 _I wonder what she'd look like crying._

Probably lots of mascara dripping down her face. Maybe a little bit of lipstick on her teeth, if she bit her lip. Smears of black on her hands from her rubbing her eyes to wipe away tears –

He stopped himself right there, because his thoughts had been wandering down some dark path that was _way too dark,_ even by his standards. The rest of the time was somewhat normal – see her smile, twitch in pain, try to smile back, twitch in pain – until she left later that afternoon looking a little nervous and worried, because she'd recognized the nervousness was actually his newly contagious emotions and was now _concerned._

But he didn't really give a damn, because _what the BLEEP was wrong with him?_

Had he really wanted to make her _cry?!_ The urge had come back, even stronger, and had begun trying to creep spiteful words into their conversation, words that could so easily tear her emotions into the abstract equivalent of bloody pieces -

 _Words that he had never once thought of saying to her, in the brief month since they'd started dating._

Hell, some of those words he'd been thinking of saying he hadn't _known_ would be hurtful, at least not until that dark little whisper had assured him that _oh yes, this is totally real, and did you know Tambry's adopted and she never knew?_

 _And that her old family gave her away because they were addicts and didn't want to waste their precious beer money on a baby?_

Tambry may have been his goth girl, through and through, and usually focused more on her phone than anything else, but he _knew_ something like that could hurt her, hurt her somewhere down deep, and do _irreversible_ damage.

After that, the little whispers only got stronger. He'd look at a random somebody walking down the street, and think _huh, her husband's cheating on her, I better tell her_ or _hey kid your mom thinks you're stupid and a waste of space_ or, once, _hey mayor, did you know that your great-great aunt was a cyclops, big and ugly?_

He'd never felt so horribly, wretchedly _evil_ before, and yet somehow, at the same time, some little lizard-brain part of him was _reveling_ in it.

A week later, when those same dark whispers finally escaped from his stinking mouth and his parents' expressions turned shocked and hurt and _furious_ , he fled to the graveyard and sunk into the first open grave he could find, praying once more that someone would come along and bury whatever he was becoming for good.

Because even now, when he knew he should be feeling shame for what he had spat at the man and woman who had taken care of him for years, _he didn't feel a single god-damn spark of it._


	9. McGucket

If there was one single expert on _forgettin'_ in Gravity Falls, it was good ol' Fiddleford McGucket.

Heck, he was the creator of the memory gun, the founder of the Society of the Blind Eye, and he'd been wiping his own memories for decades before that Blind Ivan feller had taken the gun from him. On top o' that, thanks to his memories finally returning, he knew exactly how forgettin' actually worked – after all, how else was he supposed to 'ave made the memory gun do it if he didn't know how the human brain did it?

But knowin' how it worked and seeing it happen every time he exited a room – seein' his son's eyes go blank every time he looked over his own shoulder, or watchin' the Northwest girl try 'n describe him to somebody else even though she didn't remember a gosh darn thing – were two completely different cans of beans.

What, oh what, had he done to deserve this? All he'd ever done was gone to college, went to make a name for himself, and come to help a friend with his research! And yet here he was, sittin' in a room in the new McGucket estate, and turnin' into a monster.

The teleportation thingamabob had scared him something awful, especially after he'd been stuck halfway through a wall, but it was nothin' compared to watching his own hands grow long and spindly, and his arms turn to twigs, all in but a few short seconds. He'd seen what had happened of the last time he'd been turned inta' somethin' new – he'd lost years of his life that way, and he didn't want to become the madman he once was, not again.

Even after the scare had faded, and he realized he was still the ol' Fiddleford he remembered, he wasn't the same, and even when people remembered them, he'd seen the looks of unease in all their faces whenever he was nearby, and whenever they saw him.

There was something truly awful, seeing that fear on people's faces, after everythin' he'd went through for this here town, and it led him to think that, just maybe, it was better to be forgotten, just this once.

* * *

It was the young'un Mabel Pines, during one of her many flights across the town, that first suggested it.

"You know, Old Man McGucket?" She said, beaming at him. "It'd be nice if I could actually remember what you looked like and sounded like after I left!"

She hadn't brought up the subject again, but after she left, an' the house had gone back to being quiet, his son had come into the room with a thoughtful expression on 'is face.

"You know, Pops, it _would_ be nice to have a picture of you or something."

So they'd started tryin' things.

The first thing they'd tried was one of the old cameras his son had collected in his young'un years. The photograph was taken and developed, the first photos of Fiddleford since Weirdmageddon.

It came out blurred somethin' awful, but even so, if you squinted at it, you could barely make out Fiddleford's figure, far too tall and skinny, even for an old man.

So they kept tryin'. They moved onto another photograph, and another, until the ol' camera ran out of film and burned out from whatever supernatural force was brewin' beneath his skin. After that, they tried movin' on to newfangled cameras – fancy digital cameras with video-traping and flash that could be turned off. Those cameras burned out all the quicker, and every time he appeared in the pictures, his new monster-body was blurry and blotchy, like the scribbles of a madman.

How fittin', for a former madman to look like the creation of another.

Eventually, they gave up on the cameras entirely and moved on to writin'. Words couldn't be blurred out by describing something. Still, that presented another problem entirely, because whenever his son looked away from him to write down the words, he completely forgot what he was goin' to write.

"Or for heaven's sake!" The Northwest girl burst out finally one day, seeing their struggles. "Here, I'll describe him, and you just write the words down!"

And she did so, staring him full in the face even as her newfangled golden eyes twitched in protest. She described him down to every last detail, from the odd glowin' wisps of his beard to his twiggy arms to his deep-sunken eyes and long pointy face and nose, and the spindly joints of each hand and foot, as well as their long ragged nails.

When she was done, she left immediately, and took him a mighty long time to find 'er again, and ask why she'd done it.

"Because you don't _deserve that_ ," she snapped. "You were one of the people that saved the town and the first hillbilly that a Northwest ever held hands with! People shouldn't forget that, _or_ you!"

All he could do was thank her, and leave before his eyes could start gushing.

* * *

Several weeks later, the letter his son had sent off to his former wife came back with a drawing of the creature the letter had described – a picture of him, based on the description his ol' flame had gotten, with a tiny message in her handwriting down in the corner.

 _Hang in there, Fiddle. Even if we don't remember what you look like, we still remember_ you.

He did cry, then.

* * *

 **I didn't mean this to happen, but McGucket somehow ended up kinda... Slenderman-y.**

 **Also, sorry this took me so long to write this! You wouldn't think McGucket would be hard to write, but... well.**


	10. Ford

He couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't feel, or taste, or touch. There was nothing there but blackness, and an infinite swarm of _words_ writing themselves across his mind.

He didn't know what had happened, at first. He could barely remember his own name, Stanford, when the torrent had begun – there were just too many _words,_ so many in so many different languages, all whirling and spinning and fighting to make room for themselves in his head, and he could barely _think._

It was only after a line of words in familiar handwriting began that he realized what they meant.

 _Dear Diary! Hello, Diary! It's been so long, I've missed you, and I know you've missed me too! It's your pal Mabel!_

Mabel. _Mabel._ His niece, a brown-haired girl with a bright bubbly smile.

 _Well, your pal Mabel and her poor nerd bro-bro! Dipper's writing this for me, since I make paper burst into flames by accident now!_

And _Dipper._ His talented nephew, the boy he'd offered an apprenticeship to, who he last remembered so desperately helping him do his research, to reverse the strange transformations that had taken hold of the ten saviors of Gravity Falls.

 _So, things have been weird lately. I turned into_ _a fireball_ _flames_ _fire, and I can fly now! And poor Dip-dop got turned into a tree, but now he can be_ _two trees_ _six trees at once!_

The words scrawled themselves across his conciousness, glowing brilliantly like beacons as he struggled to focus on them, being written out even as he watched, and it was _then_ that he finally realized what he had been… _seeing,_ for lack of a better word, for so long.

 _The written word._

He'd been seeing what people had written down, be they in old hieroglyphs or cursive script, and regardless of who had written them. Why, it was no wonder he'd been so overwhelmed – there were thousands of _years'_ worth of writing left over from ancient civilizations, as far back as Egypt, perhaps even farther, and he'd been seeing it all at once!

For a moment, he was brimming with excitement, at the _possibilities,_ before his niblings' next written words brought him back down to earth.

 _Grunkle Stan was turned into a statue. Hs been put up in the town square, and the townspeople even put a sign there! It says "Stanley Pines, the hero of Gravity Falls." They wanted to put "in memory of" in front of that, but it just didn't seem right, you know?_

His good mood vanished, and he focused on the grim words as they continued to be written.

Gideon Gleeful, the little boy who had worked with Bill before turning on him for Mabel, a living crystal ball.

Robbie, the boy that had been Dipper's rival, an eldritch abomination of contagious emotion.

Wendy, the girl who Dipper had a massive, undeniable crush on, a fox of ice, roaming the forest.

Pacifica Northwest, a girl who had taken refuge in the Mystery Shack during Weirdmageddon, turned into gold and nearly sold by her own parents.

Fiddleford, his old friend, forgotten save for a written description and an artist's interpretation of his current appearance.

And, finally, Ford himself.

 _Grunkle Ford… he doesn't even look like himself any more. He's a book now, full of writing from all over the world. We haven't been able to talk to him. We've tried._

And in the darkness of his word-filled mind, Ford couldn't help but… _smile,_ for lack of a better term, at the irony.

 _I wanted all the knowledge in the world, and_ _look where it got me._

 _I'm so sorry._ _I'm so sorry I couldn't find some way to stop it._

And then, finally, a glimpse of hope. Because he had _all the written knowledge in the world at his fingertips._

 _If anybody can find a way to get us out of this mess… it's me._

* * *

 **And with this last drabble, Adjustment Period has come to a close! I will probably write more Zodiac Ten stuff in the future - I've got general plot figured out for at least one more important point in time in this AU, something preeeeetty important indeed. But for now, I've got other stuff I want to write. Hope you all enjoyed this!**


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